Black says he never slighted Canada
TORONTO — Conrad Black may be known for his very public and dramatic renouncement of his Canadian citizenship. But he doesn’t believe that disqualifies him from writing the latest book on the country’s history.
His 1,020-page book, Rise to Greatness: The History of Canada from the Vikings to the Present, showcases the same dedication to detailed research he displayed in earlier tomes on U.S. history and political figures.
It is also full of praise for many of the great Canadian political and military figures who had the vision and determination to look at the “absolutely savage wilderness” of Canada and shape it into a great entity.
But it may seem like an odd choice of topic for someone who deliberately chose a life peerage in the British House of Lords — as Baron Black of Crossharbour — over his Canadian citizenship in 2001. In renouncing his citizenship, he is on record as dismissing his native land as “an oppressive little world” and “a Third World dump run by raving socialists.”
Black, 70, acknowledges he “was widely pilloried for having despised Canada,” when he spurned Canada after then-prime minister Jean Chretien tried to block his peerage. But he calls the accusations against him “rubbish” and says he “did nothing of the kind.”
“I said when I renounced my citizenship that it had nothing to do with my high opinion of Canada and it was entirely for this reason (that) when conditions changed I would seek to regain that citizenship,” Black says.
“I just had to wait for everything to settle down,” he says, “but it has absolutely nothing to do with a person’s competence to write a history of a country.”
Black says he plans to reapply for citizenship.
The book recounts Canada’s history from 874 to the present, not as series of unrelated events but as a narrative that links the various major historical figures that drove the creation of a bicultural country that could balance U.S. and British interests while increasing its own sovereignty and sense of self.